Category Archives: Extrapolations

Sometimes, what goes around does come around. I first started playing with Mozilla, a project launched by Netscape Communications, in 1998. That was a whopping ten years ago. I was in Bangalore, fresh out of college, and had finished a stint in Rajasthan as a substitute French teacher to dilute the effects of four years of undergraduate mathematics and computer science. Hiatus aside, grad school or profession or professional gadabout? The technology industry came calling with its dubious promises of intriguing work and the potential to travel (and a free cafeteria to eat in, and a free Internet connection), and Bangalore was the place to be, with its nascent information technology subculture.

Something stuck, because by early 2001, I was working for Netscape as Technology Evangelist on Mozilla. Continue reading →

I believe in the general synchronicity of summer, and think June and July bring unexpected Jungian gifts. This is an eventful summer for me in many ways, but for now, a quick word on my professional life.

Firstly, buddy and fellow AOLer Kevin Lawver blogged with gusto about replacing me as AOL’s Advisory Committee Representative to the W3C. I’m going to be doing other things professionally within AOL, and Kevin, a Standards Titan at AOL, is the right guy to step up and bat for the company. I’m still going to be a member of various W3C working groups. And I got elected by the Advisory Committee to be a member of W3C’s Advisory Board, which serves an advisory role to the W3C staff. I’m honored to have been elected, and start “officially” in July. As a member of the AC, Kevin will face all the questions of the relevancy of W3C and AOL engineers making time to participate in standards that I did, and I wish him all the very best.

Secondly, the blogosphere has already been given an inkling of myAOL, a suite of web applications that I’m working on as part of a great team of AOL engineers. We’re going to launch it this summer. In particular, I’m part of the team working on Mgnet (pronounced magnet), a way to discover content through some innovative navigational metaphors. Can’t wait to go beta already!

“I don’t know what you’re so highly strung about,” Charles said to me, a few minutes before our panel was about to begin. I was anxiously asking him to wolf his breakfast down and rush to the Green Room, which is the panel ante room at SxSW. “It will be ok — trust me.” I often wish I was as calm as Charles about things.

He was right, of course. The panel I moderated on Web browsers at SxSW even got scooped by PC Magazine — yay! The article mentions the empty seats, which certainly caused a brief sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. Nobody likes to throw a party and have scant attendance. But the panel itself went swimmingly, and towards the end I’d say we had over 150 people in there. Thank you, Brendan, Chris, and Charles.

South By Southwest is a phenomenon. After my first visit last year, I’ve stopped thinking of it as just a big music thing in Austin, Texas (silly me). This year, I’m speaking on two panels as part of the Interactive Festival part of SxSW. I’m chairing one of these panels.

Jim Ley invited me in Boston to check out Joost as an alpha-tester. Joost is the startup formerly referred to as The Venice Project (and also known affectionately as The Covenant in W3C circles). The guys who started Skype and Kazaa are behind it. They’ve hired some really smart SVG brains, among others.

While playing with it, I think I had a vague “aha!” moment about social media as television. Sure, there are bandwidth issues (insert net neutrality snide remark), but the Joost guys figure they’ve solved affiliated compression problems.

One of the things I like is that each channel has its own chat room, and you get plugins like instant messaging in full screen mode. I wonder where all the content will come from, since this is not about user-generated content. Content is a bit limited (how much of the surf video can you watch?) but I got really engrossed in an independent movie and started watching it. Before I knew it, a whopping hour had passed. Just like vegging out in front of the (regular) TV! I haven’t (yet) found a sufficient community to test out the plugins like chatting and ratings, but the left-over insight following my “aha!” moment suggests that there is, indeed, a “There there.”

I like the slick SVG menus that overlay the video when it is playing. I read somewhere that these guys use XUL Runner, apparently, and leverage a pretty diverse open source stack. I really like the fact that despite user-agent foibles, the Joost (Yoost?) folks make use of the most appropriate technology. That’s in keeping with my view that many of the most interesting things on the Web will likely be the sum of small parts, and not an immersive user agent experience. That is, Web technologies (protocols — HTTP — and formats — e.g. SVG) will be leveraged where they make the most sense, cobbled into application-driven user agents (not classic “Web browsers”). I think this is particularly true in the mobile world, and said so in my Mobile 2.0 presentation.